Customization of products and services allows an individual to personalize an item to reflect a plethora of different moods, preferences, personalities, feelings, information, likes, dislikes, etc. Footwear is an area in which people are often very particular and their footwear often serve as a sign of self-expression, style, functionality, individuality and a variety of other purposes. Currently, many footwear manufactures use internal or external designers to produce new looks for their footwear. Some even perform marketing trials and tests to determine which styles may sell the best in order to maximize their investments. In order to account for the plethora of different styles, a manufacturer needs to produce a variety of different footwear styles in order to appease all the different tastes of users. This increases costs to the manufacturer and reduced profitability. In addition, users of the footwear may not like the majority of footwear available and/or may wish that there were minor style differences to the existing footwear to better fit their tastes.
In the past, there have been some attempts to illuminate small portions of footwear with LEDs, giving user's some footwear customization as well as limited customization. In the past, footwear may include illuminated phosphors or LED's in random patterns that are located only in small areas of the footwear and at very low resolutions, wherein users may select a desired illumination sequence from a limited set of preprogrammed sequences. Although the low resolution pixels may change color or flash sequence, they do not covering a large or majority portion of the shoe, are not high resolution or provide for a large number of color variations. In addition, the designs and patterns are not customizable so the user can have a wide variety of options for what is displayed.
There have been recent developments in display technologies, including by way of example Liquid Crystal Displays (LCDs), Digital Light Projectors (DLPs) and the like. One particular recent display technology is Organic Light Emitting Diode (OLED) technology. OLED displays comprise LED's having an emissive electroluminescent layer that is made up of organic compounds. These OLED displays are low-powered, light-weight, flexible and allow for high-resolution design display. One reason for the reduced power is that OLED displays do not utilize a backlight and the displays can be made very thin (fractions of millimeters thick).
Presently, there is no way for the users or manufacturers of footwear to customize their footwear to display different high resolution designs in a quick and easy manner nor is there a way of covering large portions of footwear with a display.